


The Last Day

by mrsredboots



Series: The Triplets after School [2]
Category: Chalet School - Elinor M. Brent-Dyer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 10:37:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4784249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrsredboots/pseuds/mrsredboots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Margot Maynard reflects on her life</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Day

Sister Mary Margaret sat on the verandah of the deserted mission hospital, enjoying an unusual and unexpected quiet day. Her sisters had all been evacuated the previous day, but Sister Mary Margaret had promised a small boy, Festus, that she would be with him to the end. Festus had not been fit to be moved when the other patients had been sent home, and Sister Mary Margaret had refused to leave him. Mother Mary Joseph had made her promise to leave after 48 hours, since it would be too dangerous to wait any longer, and it was obvious that Festus had very few hours to live. And, indeed, he had died in her arms only four hours after the other nuns had left to catch what Sister Mary Margaret profoundly hoped would not prove to be the final plane out of Equatorial Kundu. Thomas, the Mission's smiling man-of-all-work, had agreed to come and fetch her in time to catch the Wednesday plane to London, from where she could travel to the Mission's headquarters and, perhaps, a time of rest and spiritual regeneration before moving on to another post, or, perhaps, to return to the Mission, if the situation in Kundu improved.

But that would be tomorrow. For now, Sister Mary Margaret found herself in the unusual situation, for her, of having nothing to do, and nobody to see. Her case was packed, she could leave at any moment. But there wouldn't be another flight out until Wednesday, unless, of course, the Embassy chartered a plane to evacuate its staff. Or unless the rebels – but Sister Mary Margaret sat on that thought very firmly. No good frightening herself with what-ifs. She could only entrust herself to God's safekeeping, and await events.

What a long journey it had been, to this remote village in Africa and the mission hospital there. Where had it begun?

\---oo0oo---

She had not always been a happy child. The third of triplets can occasionally feel the “odd one out”, and Margot, as she had been called, was no exception. Moreover, an attack of bronchial pneumonia when she was a baby had left her frail and prone to “chests”, and, to help her become really fit and well again, her aunt and uncle had offered to take her to Canada with them, when they went out there for a two-year placement with their own rather frail daughter, Josette and the younger members of their family. True, once she had settled down, she had enjoyed herself no end, and her parents and siblings had joined her at the end of the first year, but nevertheless, there was a distinct, if slight, separation between her and her sisters, and no matter how hard she tried, she had been unable to close the gap. This was not helped by the fact that both her triplet sisters were naturally hard-working, and she herself was not, and often found herself in a form appropriate for her age, while her sisters were almost always in the year above. And she had often been jealous, both of their closeness, and of their friends, culminating in an appalling scene when – Sister Mary Margaret still hated thinking of this – she had stooped so low as to blackmail another girl.

Sister Mary Margaret, many years and many thousands of miles away from that disgraceful episode murmured a prayer for the girl in question, Ted Grantley, now married and settled down after sowing several bucketsful of wild oats during the 1960s. At least she was still in touch with Ted via her sister Con. Unlike Margot's own closest friend, Emerence Hope, who had dropped out of contact around the time that Margot took her first vows. Neither Emerence nor Margot had been what might be called model schoolgirls, and it was while she was struggling with temptations to mischief that she became aware of the darker side of her personality, which at twelve years old she had referred to as “My Devil”.

“My Devil” had led her into a great deal of trouble, one way and the other, over the years. There was the time that she had been fooling around on a school excursion and had fallen into Lake Lucerne. And that awful episode with Ted. And the time when she had totally lost her temper with another girl and thrown the nearest thing at her, which unfortunately happened to be a book-end and had hurt the other girl quite badly. And the countless times she had snapped at her younger siblings, or been a less than ideal role model for them.

\--oo0oo---

But gradually, as she had got older, she had learnt self-control. Most of the time, anyway. There had been one or two notable exceptions, especially when, as Games prefect, she had had to cope with girls who were unable, or unwilling, to play to the high standard the school demanded. Margot had not suffered fools gladly – in fact, she mused, she still didn't. She would not have made a good Novice Mistress, she thought, remembering the patience and, yes, love, shown her by Mother Mary Ursula, who had been her Novice Mistress. This would, she reckoned, have been a thankless task at the best of times, but particularly during those troubled years following Vatican II, when all of them were struggling to make sense of their vocation, and indeed, of their faith.

Margot had been brought up to trust implicitly in God's love. Her parents had both been Catholic converts, her father as a teenager, her mother during the first years of her marriage. The triplets, and their younger siblings, had learnt their first prayers at their mother's knee, and her staunch faith in God's love and goodness had been reinforced by the steady example of the majority of the school staff. Of course, not all the family had stayed faithful to their childhood teachings. Con and Mike had both completely rebelled against faith in any kind, and many of the others appeared to pay only lip-service to being Catholic. Although, of course, you never really knew what went on in people's hearts and souls. But Margot's faith had seldom wavered, and when the call to religious life came, at some stage during her adolescence, she had known that she would never be content until she had at least made an effort to test her vocation.

After school, she had chosen to read medicine at Edinburgh university, rather than following her triplets to Oxford. She wanted to establish preliminary links with the medical Order where she knew she would one day test her vocation, and their Mother house was only an hour's train ride away. Her first visit there had been during a Reading Week in her first term.

Sister Mary Margaret smiled, remembering what a shock she had had when she found comfortable beds and a modern bathroom in the guest house. She had half been expecting a straw mattress and cold water only. She had been more shocked, however, to find that not only did she not feel instantly at ease and “at home” in the convent, but the nuns almost seemed to discourage her from wanting to become one of them.

“We had to, you see,” Mother Mary Ursula had explained a few years later. “We long and pray for vocations, of course, but we do prefer people to be very, very sure before they commit to coming to us. It is so unsettling when people come, and then leave within a fortnight.”

For Margot, there had never been any question of leaving. Although she went home to Switzerland every summer for a fortnight, and occasionally at Christmas, all the rest of her holidays had been spent at the Convent, gradually taking more part in the life of the community. Eventually it had not been a question of if she would join them, but when. After long discussion, and much prayer, it was agreed that she would enter once she had obtained her MB, five years after leaving school.

\---oo0oo---

The first couple of years went smoothly enough, with no more difficulties beyond that which could have been expected. Margot had never anticipated that the transition to religious life would be easy, and indeed, it wasn't. Many of the young women who entered with her to test their vocations gave up and returned to the outside world. Margot, however, persevered. Not without many struggles with herself - “My Devil” was not going to give in without a fight. But gradually she adjusted to the life of prayer, of service, of obedience, of community. She received the habit, and spent another year as a novice, working in the hospital associated with the Order. Then came her Simple Vows, and it was after that that disaster struck.

The community had undergone some profound changes after Vatican II, and it was decided that, as an experiment, Margot and a couple of other sisters would “live out” in a mini-community of their own, while working in the large Edinburgh hospital where Margot had trained. Unfortunately, it hadn't occurred to anybody that the hours that a NHS hospital required of their young doctors, combined with the lack of the regular Office in the chapel, the abandonment of the habit in favour of a white coat and the general zeitgeist of the late 1960s was not a good idea. Without the discipline of the community, the young women were all over the place. One moved straight into a hospital flat, although she still considered herself part of the community. Another spent most of her spare time, such as it was, in the pub.

Margot tried to soldier on, but found herself very attracted to one of the other young doctors. She knew she needed to fight the attraction if she was to remain in the community, but made the mistake of repressing it, rather than admitting it existed and facing up to it. She tried to fast and pray to “make it go away”, but ended up even more exhausted than she had been before, and malnourished as well. Finally, in a haze of exhaustion, she made a mistake in diagnosis, resulting in the death of a patient. Within days, she found herself out of a job, with cruel words from the object of her affections ringing in her ears.

She was not sure what to do. She had reached rock-bottom. She was not at all sure that she could go on, either as a nun or as a woman. Where was the community when she needed it?

Fortunately, changes had taken place in the community, the progressive Mother-General who had authorised the experiment having been replaced by the more conservative Mother Mary Ursula, who had been Margot's novice mistress. One of the first things she did was to visit the little flat where the three sisters ostensibly lived, and found Margot huddled in her bed, unable to care for herself, let alone pray.

Far away, under the African sun, Sister Mary Margaret shuddered away from the memory, and from the memories of the recovery, which had been long and difficult, but steady. Margot spent several months on retreat with an order of contemplative nuns, receiving spiritual direction that helped her come to terms with what had happened, the mistakes she had made, and the reasons behind those mistakes. Then she returned to her community, and to the work in the hospital there, although it took her a long time to learn to trust her own judgement in medical matters. But in the end, her final vows only needed to be postponed for six months, and eventually Sister Mary Margaret was sent on her first tour of duty, fulfilling at last the call that she had experienced so long ago. 

\---oo0oo---

Her first tour of duty had been to the South American country of Vespugia. When she had first heard of the posting, Sister Mary Margaret had protested that she was trilingual in French, German and English, so why was she being sent to a country where the main language was Spanish?

“You will soon pick it up,” said Mother Mary Ursula. “And I think it is going to be exactly the right place for you.”

Mother Mary Ursula was right – as usual, thought Sister Mary Margaret – and the seven years she had spent at the mission hospital in San Clemente had been seven of the happiest years of her life. At last she was doing what she had been designed to do. Whether she was working in the up-to-date mission hospital, or travelling in the mountains to minister to the tribespeople in remote areas, or even spending time quietly in the convent, she was content. She learnt to speak Spanish nearly as fluently as the French and German she had spoken since her earliest childhood, and even learnt to communicate in at least one of the tribal languages, if only on a rather primitive level. She had got on well with the other sisters in that particular community, and enjoyed the challenge of new people as some sisters reached the end of their rotations, and others came in.

It had been a very healing time, she realised now. She had been able to put the past behind her, and live almost entirely in the present, taking each day as it came, praying, meditating, working.... and it came as a shock when her tour of duty ended and she was recalled to Scotland. After a break, she was sent down to London, to do a diploma in Tropical Medicine in preparation for her next posting.

\---oo0oo---

“I feel like a time-traveller!” she exclaimed to her sister, Len, who had come down to London to see her. “Everything's so different! Even our habit is a little different, now – in Vespugia, we had kept the older habit. At least we get to wear one, although we may wear mufti when it's appropriate.”

“You don't like wearing mufti, do you?” asked Len, shrewdly, and remembering the disasters of nine years or so earlier.

“Not when I'm out and about – I do like the security of it. But we're painting the refectory this weekend – I can't do that in a habit! And I'm more than glad that they have abandoned the idea of only two or three of us living together, as you can imagine.”

Sister Mary Margaret had loved seeing those of her family who lived in England, and catching up with their news. All three triplets thoroughly enjoyed half a day spent together, the first time they had all three been together for several years.

It was amazing, though, how very little the three had in common now. Len was Head of Modern Languages at her school, once an eminent Birmingham grammar and now a large comprehensive. Reg, her husband, was head of a large health centre in the same area. Con was editing the UK edition of a glossy American women's magazine, and was hoping to eventually become the editor of the flagship American magazine. She had never married, although Margot suspected that she was still far from celibate. Their lives were all so very different from one another's, that they almost ran out of things to talk about. Yet, when all was said and done, they were still triplets, and although they had gone their separate ways, each of them knew that they needed to know that the others were all right, no matter how little they could find to talk about.

Margot had also been glad to hear news, and receive visits, from the rest of the family. Her father had now retired from the Swiss sanatorium he had been running for so many years, and her parents had moved back to Die Blumen, their house on the Tiernsee in the Austrian Tirol. With them had gone their youngest daughter, Phil, who was lame after an attack of polio as a small child. Felicity and Cecil, the other two sisters, were both busy bringing up young families. Neither lived in England – Felicity lived in Germany and Cecil had remained in Switzerland – although both did pay brief visits during Margot's year in London. Of the brothers, Geoff was just finishing a degree in Geography, with no real idea what he wanted to do next. Felix was an architect, Mike a Naval surgeon and Steve an engineer. All three were married with growing families. Charles, however, was a monk at the Grande Chartreuse in France, and lived in fairly extreme seclusion, only seeing his family on very rare occasions, although those of them who thought of such things were aware of his prayers for them.

He did write, though, to several of his siblings, especially Margot and Len, who occasionally teased him about becoming over-fond of the famous green liqueur. “But what's really, really delicious,” said Len, “is the walnut aperitif they make there! Now, I could drink that all day, especially when poured over apricot ice-cream!”

“I'll take your word for it,” said Margot, who was not fond of sweet drinks, although she had enjoyed some of the Vespugian wines during her tour of duty there.

Once she had successfully achieved her Diploma in Tropical Medicine, it was back to Scotland, to the Mother House. The custom was that you served a “rotation”, as they were known, of seven years at a given mission station, and then a two-year break in your home country, often studying, as Sister Mary Margaret had been, for further qualifications. She had assumed that she would be going to a tropical country, and realised that the options of where she would be posted were limited. So it was no real surprise when Mother Mary Ursula told her that she was to join the mission station in Maisonville, Equatorial Kundu.

\---oo0oo---

Kundu was very different to Vespugia, and not only because it was tropical. Sister Mary Margaret hadn't expected to enjoy the climate, and indeed, she found the humidity very trying. And quite apart from the normal illnesses, plus the malaria, bilharzia and similar conditions that she had been led to expect, there were a worrying number of cases of a new illness, that the local people called “Slim disease”, when for no apparent reason, people in the prime of life lost weight, became emaciated, and died, often of pneumonia or with a rare form of cancer. Many orphaned children ended up at the mission, and the sisters ran an unofficial orphanage and school, as well as the hospital.

Sister Mary Margaret had little to do with the orphans at first, working primarily with adults in the main hospital. She did act as medical officer to the orphanage, and was sometimes called over to look at a poorly child, and gradually she began to gravitate more and more to the children in her spare time. It had been a long time since she had had younger brothers and sisters to look after, and the children and their needs awoke something in her that had long been dormant.

Mother Mary Frances, the Superior at the Mission, recognised this and encouraged Sister Mary Margaret to spend time over there, helping Sisters Mary Elizabeth and Mary Luke bath the little ones and chatting to the older kids.

Two boys, especially, became dear to her. Thomas, a serious and intelligent 16-year-old, who reminded her vividly of her brother Steve at that age. Thomas' main love was machinery and engines, and his joy when he was promoted to driving the mission's minibus knew no bounds. Sister Mary Luke was busy investigating apprenticeships for him, and wondering how the money could be raised to help him. Meanwhile, Festus was a cheerful and noisy 3-year-old, whose mother had died of the “slim disease”.

\---oo0oo---

The first four years passed peacefully enough. Sister Mary Margaret's father, himself a noted doctor, always gave the Community a subscription to the British Medical Journal and the Lancet each Christmas, so Sister Mary Margaret and the other doctors were able to follow the painfully slow research into this new disease that they were learning to call “Aids” among themselves, although the patients still always called it “Slim”. They learnt that babies born from infected mothers would most probably be infected themselves, and die as small children, and, indeed, several children in the orphanage died before their fifth birthdays, despite all the sisters could do to help them.

Sister Mary Margaret had worried about Festus, but it seemed that he had been born before his mother was infected, as he grew strong and healthy, with no sign of disease. He was a bright child, and the sisters were wondering how they could arrange for him to have an education suited to his needs when the civil war broke out.

The country consisted of two tribes, the Arkutu and the Induye. At that time, the Induye were in power, but the Arkutu decided they should be the ones to govern, and, having overthrown the government in an exceptionally bloody coup, they then proceeded to try to remove any and all opposition in the most final and possible way. The Induye, not wishing either to give up power, nor to be destroyed, fought back with interest. The Arkutu were, it was thought, funded by Soviet interests, and many of their young leaders had been to the Soviet Union for training. It was not known who was funding the Induye, whether United States or South Africa.

To start with, life did not change much at the Mission. The Sisters saw more and more wounded, rather than sick, patients, and occasionally someone would disappear, volunteering to join his tribe's army. They kept the orphans close; no question now of sending Festus to one of the formerly prestigious schools in the capital, nor of sending Thomas, or any other boy, to do an apprenticeship anywhere. Father Damian, the priest attached to the Mission, was himself a keen mechanic and taught Thomas all he knew, with Festus and some of the other boys picking up much of his knowledge almost without realising it.

But life had to go on. The care of the children, the care of the patients, and, above all, the saying of the Office continued day in, day out. But more and more refugees arrived, food became more and more scarce, and the fighting armies drew nearer and nearer. The sisters realised that their position was rapidly becoming untenable.

And then yesterday, the order had come to evacuate. But Sister Mary Margaret had refused to leave, for Festus, always her favourite among the children, had somehow managed to upset a pan of boiling oil over himself, and was suffering such severe burns that it was clear he could not live. He was conscious, and clinging tight to Sister Mary Margaret's hand. “Ma soeur, ne me quitte pas,” he kept murmuring. And Sister Mary Margaret insisted that she must and would stay with him until the end.

\---oo0oo---

If only they had waited, she thought, twenty-four hours later. Festus had died in her arms within four hours of the van leaving, long before curfew. They could have all left together. But that had not happened, and it was no good fretting over a might-have-been. All being well, Thomas would bring the van back tomorrow and take her to the airport, and in the meantime, she had nothing to do but pray, and it was now time for the Office.

Sister Mary Margaret got up from the Verandah and went into the chapel. As always, a quietness took over. No matter how busy she was, whenever she went into the chapel and prepared to pray, she felt the peace and stillness come over her. Not that she always found prayer easy, far from it, but the “prayed-in” feel of the chapel was a big help.

She read the appointed Psalms and Readings to herself, and then spent a long time on her knees, praying for her sisters, her community, the various orphans who had been taken further up-country with the other refugees, for Festus' soul, for her birth family, her friends, all those she had remembered during her earlier reminiscences.

And then she heard shots. Machine-gun fire. The sound of engines and shouts. Her first thought was to hide, perhaps in the pulpit. But something in her revolted at the thought, it would be cowardice, she felt. Suddenly she remembered an episode from her childhood, when her sisters had come out to Canada to join her. The first evening, she had noticed a scar on her sister Len's arm.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I got burnt,” said Len. “I was carrying a basket and a match went into it, and it caught fire. It hurt dreadfully – I told Mama that I could never be a martyr, because it hurt too much.”

“Goodness,” the 9-year-old Margot had said, “What did Mama say?”

“She said that if God wanted me to be a martyr, he would give me the strength to be it!”

Margot smiled, remembering that childish episode. And she was still smiling when the soldier burst into the chapel and emptied the contents of his magazine into her. God had, indeed, given her the strength when she needed it, and “her devil” was vanquished forever.


End file.
